Expanding our Research – Altered States of Consciousness

The research faculty at the Division of Perceptual Studies are seeking grants and private funding to support the following research initiatives regarding the research into small children who remember previous lives.We thank you for your interest and for your generous support of our research.

Dr. Kim Penberthy is researching a variety of altered states of consciousness in part to assess and observe their potential to produce extraordinary abilities and experiences in participants that challenge the prevailing mainstream physicalist point of view.

Experiences to be studied include

• deep meditation including mystical, transcendent, and non-dual experiences
• extended forms of perception such as out-of-body, precognition, clairvoyance, mind-matter interactions, and facilitated altered states.

The experience of transient extraordinary human experiences during deep mediation may be more prevalent than is commonly recognized and could represent an important component of such states of consciousness. We hypothesize that a significant percentage of individuals who pursue altered states consciousness via deep meditation will report one or more extraordinary human experiences.  Through these heightened altered states achieved through deep meditation, participants may endorse improved feelings of oneness with others, compassion, wellness and self-transcendence that may have lasting and profound effects.

Deep meditation has been observed to facilitate psi and extraordinary human experiences as have been written about in ancient texts and in other cultures. However, attempts to understand these reported extraordinary experiences in our western culture are rarely included in current mainstream meditation studies.

 
The implications of such findings may inform our understanding of the ability to access beneficial altered states of consciousness as well as the impact of such states on personal and community well-being.

Proposed Study: Systematically collect information about and examine the context, variety, frequency, and the impact of extraordinary experiences in meditators.

We Are Seeking to Establish an Online Data Collection System that is Adaptable and Expandable Regarding the Prevalence of Spontaneous Unusual Extraordinary Human Experiences Connected to Altered States. Participants will be asked to record the details of their extraordinary experiences in an online database.  They will also be asked to perform tasks to assess abilities such as precognition, clairvoyance and other psi abilities. Systematic collection of  large amounts of data will allow us to better describe the occurrences, who is having them, and under what circumstances. To date, there is a significant paucity of information in this realm.

The Online Data Base will include

1. Participants who report a range of experiences they have had in the past as well as the conditions under which they occurred.
2. We need funding to develop an iPhone app for participants to record experiences in real-time, including details of the events along with various physical/psychological factors at the time they occurred.
3. The online recording system will also be able to collect physiological data at the time of the report of the extraordinary event such as can be accomplished with an apple watch and other types of sensors and physiological measurements.

These instantaneous reports will help eliminate possible memory embellishments in the accounts, producing a giant step forward from the current pattern of getting reports years after correspondents experienced the phenomena.

Studies examining the frequency and details of spontaneous extraordinary experiences.We will collect data on the rates of occurrence and descriptions of specific details in an ongoing manner. Standardized and expandable questionnaires and tasks will be implemented to collect data, and qualitative data analysis via software such as Deuce will be conducted to evaluate themes.

After Death Communications research with Salvia Foundation that is currently under way will be expanded, and we want to examine ADCs in order to determine content themes via Deuce qualitative analysis. This study will include descriptions of after death communications reported from around the globe.

A systematic survey of self-reported of out-of-body experiences to gather information about the circumstances, the personality types, the frequency and the impact of out-of-body experience events.